Sacramento is going through hell right now. The city, its fans, and the politicians and money people who have pitched in big to support the Kings for the last 28 years, are being threatened with having their team ripped from them and transported to Seattle, and their soul along with it.

Plenty of cities know that pain, in the NBA and elsewhere. Seattle, of course, is one of them.

Thus, we’ve arrived at the moment everybody has to have seen coming for five years. We may be a signature away from the nightmare that was inevitable from the moment in 2008 that the SuperSonics were exported to Oklahoma City, with the NBA’s shady blessing.

As colleague Sean Deveney pointed out this week, David Stern owes this to Seattle; it at least slightly cleans up the biggest stain on his legacy. However, from the start, there was almost no chance that Seattle’s gain would not be some other tortured city’s loss. Sacramento drew the short straw.

More accurately, of course, Sacramento drew the untrustworthy owners, the Maloofs.

This is not a failing of the city or market, as bitter Sacramentans have pointed out ever since Wednesday. (That is the day that the first reports surfaced of a sale by the Maloofs to the group building the newly-approved Seattle arena.) Last April, a deal hammered out among the NBA, Sacramento and the Maloofs to keep the team in place – agreed to during All-Star weekend – was abandoned and denounced by the Maloofs.

This is the fatal flaw in the system of franchise free agency, or franchise roulette. It’s so engrained in our sports culture, we take it for granted … until our favorite team starts playing. This is a fairly new stage of this, though, now that expansion in the big sports has all but hit its limits: vacated cities becoming occupied again at the expense of another vacated city.

Just when you thought a filthy practice couldn’t become filthier.

With Seattle now involved, Sacramento is back to bargaining to keep the Kings. Mayor Kevin Johnson, the native of the city and former NBA star, is now rounding up new investors, and no fewer that two local owner candidates have surfaced.

“I believe the NBA knows that we're a proven market,’’ Johnson told USA Today late Friday in a story published on its website Saturday morning. “I want Seattle to get a team. They deserve a team, but I don't want it to be our team."

Johnson is not alone. Even some people in Seattle have serious misgivings about this.

They include Seattle Times columnist Steve Kelley, whose column on the topic on Thursday began, “None of this is fair,’’ and later continued, “I'll gladly buy the first season ticket. But I can't help thinking how rotten this deal is for Sacramento's basketball fans.’’

It also includes SuperSonicSoul.com, one of several local websites that sprang up in the mid-2000s when the Sonics’ existence in town was first threatened. One of the site’s founders, Paul Merrill, reacted to reports of the Maloofs angling to retain part-ownership even with the team in a new city with this: “If these are the sort of folks we have to appease to get a (pretty lousy) team, I'd rather invest in a custom team on NBA Live.’’

If this angst sounds familiar, it’s because you heard it some 17 years ago, when the Browns bolted Cleveland for Baltimore. To this day, many older Colts fans in Baltimore can’t bring themselves to pull completely behind the Ravens, because getting a team the same way they’d lost one a generation earlier left a bad taste in their mouths.

Of course, there’s evidence that segments of fans in both cities are squaring off in a battle royale for the right to say which deserves the Kings more. By extension, they want to declare which city deserves to get robbed worst. The online flame wars are only beginning, and they’ll only get worse the longer it takes to reach an outcome.

Actually, they won’t end there, either, as fans of Seattle and Oklahoma City can attest, after the Thunder reached the NBA Finals and caused the heads of ex-Sonics lovers to spontaneously combust.

Seattle does need to have the NBA make things right, after the wrong done to them. Knowing that the league was not going to expand, this was the only solution. It’s a terrible one that Sacramento did not bring on itself.

The only consolation that can be offered to Sacramento?

Some day, you’ll be the ones ripping the soul out of some poor city with cruddy ownership. Your joy will be someone else’s pain. And the first city to empathize with you might be Seattle, home of the Kings.